Dear EfU,

I have sunk many hours, most of them good, into this place, and I'm pleased (and somewhat amazed) that after 10 years it still seems to be thriving.

Since summer this year I've noticed myself slipping away in a manner I have not been before. Some of you have noticed that I've been unusually tardy in responding to forum permission requests in the last couple of months. Part of the reason is extra, hopefully temporary, grown-up responsibility due to buying a house, but mostly it's that I don't quite feel the need to check in regularly any more.

In acknowledgement that the quality of my service has become inadequate I have decided to formalise my unofficial departure: I shall henceforth be considered a retired DM and I will no longer respond to forum permission requests.

Thanks, guys. :)

:D

(My happy-smiley is broken.)

I'm very sorry about this.

We've followed up by resetting all EFUSL passwords. For dumb technical reasons we can't easily encrypt EFUSL passwords safely: that has to be done at the application level and NWScript is rather lacking in that respect, so we would need to invert the registration process to happen outside the game. And that's pointless as long as we don't have HTTPS. This is not an excuse, I just want to make clear that your EFUSL passwords are not secret and should not be treated as if they are.

I would like to restate the importance of changing passwords on any service where you may have used the same password as on EFUSL, and to never reuse that password anywhere else. For that matter, treat your forum password the same way. In fact, treat all your passwords that way.

I would also like to draw attention to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ as well as encourage you to adopt a password manager if you haven't already. Think of it this way: if you don't need to write down your password, your password is not strong enough.

I'm very sorry about this! I'm afraid a lapse in observing my responsibilities necessitated an update to the EfU launcher, but said lapse causes said update to break the previous version. There really wasn't any way to avoid it, but I've taken some steps to prevent that from happening again.

Note that the launcher is technically still fully functional -- only the self-update broke (the irony of an update function causing a failure when updating is not lost on me). You can choose to bypass the update and the launcher will work as normal; but what you should do is get the latest version.

:/

Yet another miserable chapter in the legendary migration to vBulletin 5: it runs out of memory and dies whenever we attempt to set permissions for user groups. The practical consequence of this is that we can't really make new player faction fora...

Some of you have had your passwords forcefully reset as a security measure. Sorry for the inconvenience.

http://www.efupw.com/forums/forum/in-character-forums/letters-to-npcs

I believe that should do it.

I have seen a setting to change this somewhere; but stickies don't count towards the limit and do not get relisted on older pages. I can increase the list count if that is desired, but it will not really solve the problem of sticky overload.

For the record, I know that there are a few issues with the theme -- some I have already personally identified, such as the text colour in reply boxes and PM recipients -- and the overall forum. You are highly encouraged to report any such issues in the bug report or suggestion fora. Some things are easy to fix, some aren't, and hopefully somebody will get around to reviewing feedback (I don't say that in jest -- I don't monitor activity closely enough that I can be relied on to do it, myself, but others might).

I have finished installing Arc's theme (on the last day of my vacation, even).

It is currently the default theme because, well, it has character, goes with the web site (actually, the site goes with the forum; that's why), and everyone seems to be allergic to white. You can switch themes with the dropdown in the bottom left if you don't like it or want to try something else. I have also enabled the remaining default vBulletin themes, most of which are hideous.

Huge thanks to Arc for his creative work, and apologies to him for this taking so long.

Sometimes you get this:



As far as I can see this has to do with the editor's autosaving after you've spent too much time writing. I don't know what to do about it. My recommendation is to write in an external editor but that would be my recommendation anyway; browsers are not made to do what we use them for.

I think I did it. Wow.

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Arc made a very nice theme for an older version of vBulletin 5. I'll try to get that setup sometime during my vacation but I don't know if it still works.

I only just saw this.

It is true that the launcher (occasionally) accesses the registry. It does this to locate the installation path of NWN, which is needed to actually launch the NWN executable post-update. The launcher doesn't change anything (in the registry; it downloads files, obviously) but that's not really important. Paha is most likely correct that this is what's causing the flagging. The launcher can optionally run from the same directory as the NWN executable, in which case it will skip the registry access, but I have no idea if that's enough to avoid the flagging -- probably not, because detecting that pattern in the executable is quite simple.

So: provided that you are acquiring the launcher from the GitHub page I guarantee that nothing questionable is going on.

Going down in 30 minutes.

Oh, look! A year has passed! It seems I return to this every four months.

I don't have anything else to do on Monday so I figured I'd give this another shot. Expect downtime all of Monday, UTC.